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Pulp Design Tools & Resources, Part Three: Inspiration

A necessarily brief, personal and idiosyncratic tour through some websites with noteworthy archives of 1920s/30s posters, postcards, luggage tags and other graphics. Some photos, some stuff that’s technically outside our chosen era but still cool, and far too short, but enjoy, be inspired, and get a feel for the graphics of the pulp era!

The American Library of Congress WPA Posters collection, part of their American Memory project, is huge but not that easy to navigate. Start with the Collection Highlights tour, then just start hitting random keywords or subjects to find gems like Yellowstone Park posters, injunctions to clean up your trash, and even hippos. The WPA was the Works Progress Administration, part of the whole New Deal aimed at keeping Americans employed and maintaining national morale during the Great Depression. There was a whole wing of the WPA dedicated to encouraging the arts, including the graphic arts. Hence the really cool posters.
There are also WPA posters all over the internet, including in a lot of the collections down this page. One bonus thing about them is that because they’re U.S. Government-produced, there’s no copyright on them. They can be reproduced by anyone, anywhere. Getting them through the Library of Congress website does ensure you get full-sized high quality images, though.

Vintage Poster – text in French, but who cares when you’re there for the visuals? All sorts of great stuff from all over the world and a number of languages, not just 20s/30s but ranging from the mid-19th C up to the 1970s or so. A random selection from favourites: Syrie-Liban, Brissago, Maroc, Splash! and Autriche.

Grand Hotel de France Setif (Algérie) from Art of the Luggage Label on Flickr.

Flickr has a lot of excellent stuff tucked away amongst the vacation photos, kittens and bokkeh. X-Ray Delta One (an excellent pulpish nick!) has lots of good stuff; especially in his Best of Pulp & ’30s and the WPA sets. Paul Malon posts mostly advertising material from the 20s through to the 50s, all worth checking out. His Pulp Fiction set is mostly superscience sillyiness from Popular Mechanics & similar magazines, and there’s lots of other good stuff too.

Wikipedia, and it’s sister-project Wikimedia, are very valuable sources, especially if you want flags, naval ensigns, coats of arms and similar. They’ve got a good selection of historical and extinct flags, too. Need the 1920s-current Soviet Union flag? Wikipedia has one. They’ve got the Russian Imperial Standard, too. Most of the Wikimedia images are available in SVG, which is perfect for Inkscape users!